Cloud Services Blocked in Turkey After Government Email Hack

The blockade came after a hacktivist group posted online private emails allegedly belonging to the Minister of Energy.

Turkey has reportedly responded to a hack of the government official by banning cloud-based services in the country.

As The Next Web notes, Dropbox and Microsoft OneDrive are inaccessible in Turkey, while Google Drive was "partially restricted," according to Turkey Blocks, a site that monitors censorship in the region.

"Google Drive is still accessible to existing users—possibly because Google shares its business cloud hosting infrastructure and servers between Drive and it's primary services including search," Turkey Blocks said on Saturday. The next day it tweeted that Google Drive had been unblocked after Google complied with a removal request.

The blockade came after hacktivist group Redhack posted online private emails allegedly belonging to Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Berat Albayrak (who is also the son-in-law of President of Turkey Recep Tayyip Erdogan). Unidentified hackers leaked more than 17GB of data, including 57,000 emails dating back to 2000.

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Turkey, which has a long history censoring content and services, immediately moved to block all cloud services as it investigated, as well as GitHub, where hackers often publish hacked data.

"The move to block the world's most popular cloud services comes amidst growing calls in Turkey to build local versions of popular social media services – in July, far-right Turks called for the creation of a nationalized Turkish Twitter alternative to replace the US-based company's services," Turkey Blocks notes.

Last month, the site reported a full Internet shutdown in Turkey's Southeast regions amidst the state's removal of elected officials from office. A month earlier, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube were also blocked.